Sunday, November 28, 2010

When Jim Bradley met Jim Crow

"It was inevitable, once Ontario's first Afro-centric school became reality, that disputes about race would ensue. That's what segregation does: It creates divisions between people based on race.

At issue is the Toronto District School Board's controversial suspension of the school's popular principal, Thando Hyman-Aman.

Hyman-Aman went on leave in late October, following a complaint by a parent. The nature of the complaint is not public. The board has said only that it carried out an investigation, which is now over. Hyman-Aman is expected to return to work.

Parents, understandably, are upset. They want to know why the principal was removed, and the nature of the complaint, Many parents, according to reports, strongly support her. A minority are disaffected.

Will the people of Ontario, who are paying for this school, ever get a full accounting? Not likely. The TDSB has already been scolded by a local citizen's group, the Jane and Finch Concerned Citizens Organization, for daring to appoint a white man as Hyman-Aman's temporary stand-in.

Let's parse this. It's an Afro-centric school, teaching an Afro-centric curriculum. Students of all races are technically eligible to attend. What about teachers? "I'm sure he's a nice man but the optics are bad and it couldn't have happened at a worse time," an official from the Jane-Finch group was quoted as saying in the Globe and Mail.

The optics of having a white man replacing a black woman are undoubtedly lousy, if we're talking about running a school for black kids. But what if the replacement were of mixed race? What if he were South Asian, with a dark skin tone, but not of African origin?

These impossible questions emerge naturally from the school's founding premise, which is that black students will do better in a segregated environment. That is a racist notion, at odds with Canadian values. This country has a Charter of Rights that outlaws discrimination based on race.
Isn't segregation a form of discrimination?Canada already has one segregationist, racist institution in the form of the Indian Act. Segregation and special status under the law haven't worked for aboriginal Canadians. Why not?

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character," said Martin Luther King, Jr.Amen to that. We should have one public school system"*
What's this??
Jim Bradley and his Liberals founded a publicly-funded school in Ontario based on a regressive racist notion of colour segregation?!
Well, yes: segregation became the McGuinty Liberals' shameless new 'separate-but-equal' education frontier.
Remember how the smug Liberal education minister Kathleen Wynne, and Dalton McGuinty, and Good Ole Jimmy, smarmed on and on about how faith-based educational-funding was divisive and regressive and segregationist and a threat to social cohesion in Ontario!!?
And remember how - within months of their re-election - McGuinty's Liberal hypocrites deliberately went ahead and created a new brand of regressive racial educational apartheid in Ontario?!
So... how did all that work out, Jim?
Will any local St.Catharines Standard reporter bother examining Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's duplicitous educational fear-mongering?
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